Quality volunteers can make a world of difference in today's library, and this hands-on guide gives you everything you need to maximize your library's services and build a bridge between your library and the community it serves.

This book helps the library get the most from volunteers, whether creating a program from scratch, or just refreshing what has been created for the library. It looks beyond the scope of the library to include information on partnering with community organizations to provide volunteer opportunities to library volunteers on a broader scale.

This booklet provides guidance on how to manage and make the most of volunteers in a library. It covers areas such as planning, generating commitment, and documenting and budgeting projects. The focus is upon seeing volunteers as enhancements and not as threats to library jobs.

Volunteers are crucial to the daily operation of any library. Finding and retaining the right people, motivating them and matching their skills with projects is challenging. This collection of 30 new essays brings together the experiences of numerous individuals across the U.S., providing ideas, projects and best practices for volunteer recruiting and management. The contributors—among them library board members, heads of special collections, directors of state library associations, outreach coordinators, archivists and researchers—discuss a broad range of topics in five sections: recruitment and retention; policies and process; mentoring and empowering; placement, programs and responsibilities; and outreach.

This guide will show you how to reinvigorate your library's volunteer program using your community as a resource. Volunteers are essential to a library's well-being, but running a volunteer program is a complicated task that could often be done so as to bring more benefit to your library. This book draws on the author's decades of experience in public libraries and the nonprofit arena, and on cutting-edge professional trends in volunteer management, to show you how to tap into each of your volunteer's talents and match them to your library's needs. Providing multiple tactics for improving your library's volunteer program, the book covers redoubling your recruitment efforts to attract more volunteers, more logically assigning roles, and growing your relationships with volunteers. In addition, it addresses common problems with volunteers and potential barriers to success and explains how to overcome them. No matter what size your library, its volunteer staff, or its budget, this practical book will help you to streamline your volunteer program and more effectively engage the community to transform your library into a flourishing community center.

When teens volunteer at the library, they gain new skills, make connections, and build their resumes, while libraries benefit from a new generation of advocates. This guide shows librarians how to establish or develop a teen volunteer program. Advocating a flexible approach, this book speaks to every library, including both public and school libraries. From small libraries with no budget to large libraries with seemingly endless budgets and everything in between, all of the concepts covered can be scaled up or down to meet the needs of the community being served. The book begins with the big picture, discussing benefits to teens, libraries, and communities; it then reviews volunteer types and volunteer possibilities for teens, including the traditional roles of shelving and programming as well as passion-led projects, programming opportunities, and special initiatives and drives. Specific volunteer roles are described in depth, with instructions for practical applications, and concrete examples and experiences from various types of libraries illustrate principles discussed. Readers will also learn how to establish volunteer partnerships within and outside of the library. The book ends with a discussion of methods for evaluation and assessment.